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Architecture

Marty O'Donnell got fired?!?

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Yeah, there was some discussion about this in the business thread, including someone explaining the whole "without cause" thing as a specific legal description used in some states depending on labor law.

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I bet he was one of the highest-paid employees at the company--he was certainly one of the most senior.

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Who else has been around that long? With Joe Staten gone and Marty O'Donnell now ousted, it seems like Jason Jones is the only Grizzled Ancient left at Bungie.

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It's hard to imagine Bungie without Marty, he's been there since the Myth series.

I always really loved his work, the ODST score was especially wonderful, and the preview samples of his soundtrack for Destiny have been wonderful.

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I bet he was one of the highest-paid employees at the company--he was certainly one of the most senior.

 

What would you call it when a talented high paid video game (insert) is fired over simply "being paid too much"? Activioson'd? Kotick'd? I like Kotick'd. Appropriate considering Activision is now Bungie's titular "boss".

 

Not that I know what actually happened of course. It's just that I can't think of another logical reason for the music composer to be fired.

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It's hard to imagine Bungie without Marty, he's been there since the Myth series.

That had some great music too. This one started playing in my head after I read your post

Also (even better):

 

Man, now I want to play Myth II. Such a great game.

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Who else has been around that long? With Joe Staten gone and Marty O'Donnell now ousted, it seems like Jason Jones is the only Grizzled Ancient left at Bungie.

 

Offhand, I can think of Chris Barrett, Dave Dunn, Charlie Gough and Chris Butcher...

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I've been playing Oni again recently and really like his work on that score too.

Damn, Oni, always wanted to play this game as a kid. Does it aged well?

I never played any Halo game, but Myth's music was indeed pretty good.

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That had some great music too. This one started playing in my head after I read your post

 

*snip*

 

Man, now I want to play Myth II. Such a great game.

The score for ODST is almost definitely my favorite work of Marty's:

I also love

from Reach, which plays during...

the game's playable, unwinnable epilogue where the player character has stayed behind on Reach to secure the escape of the Pillar of Autumn and is left fighting increasingly dangerous waves of covenant until succumbing.

You know, and for good measure, how about

of the series' main theme.

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I have to imagine it's something they'll eventually get around to doing, there's been plausible and consistent rumors around a Halo 3 port for years, but Microsoft has plenty of reasons to continue holding off on it for now, and will probably use it as a way to coerce people into adopting something dumb when they finally do it.

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Probably was something as stupid as money. I can see him being someone who was paid a lot by virtue of his seniority within the company, to the point where it was actually quite silly and the board decided to put an end to it

I find it incredibly unlikely that he has no idea why he was terminated. Perhaps he was offered a cut or freeze and he didn't like it, so discussions around that faded away — until now.

Ah, the wonderfully reckless conjecture that ambiguous tweets lead to. :tup:

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Being terminated without cause is not the same thing as not knowing why they did it.

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Announcing it on Twitter in the chosen way will surely lead to such assumptions, though.

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I don't think he's intentionally clouding the issue, but because labor laws are handled differently in each state, it has made some of the report criminally unclear.

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At video games, yes, but being bad at video games doesn't make you the worst...

 

Yeah that's mostly hyperbole on my part, but also in retrospect only having the ars coverage to look at makes him look better than he did at the time...in the comments of his original review or social media I vaguely remember there being some kneejerk arguing back from him about how "rabid fanboys" couldn't take a review that dissented with their opinion (when all people were doing was trying to point out that there were upgrade points he could have spent), but I bet all that stuff's been redacted/memory holed by now.

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